Carville: ‘I’m Scared to Death’ 2020 Dems Blowing It by Talking About Voting from Jail, Open Borders
3:41
Former lead strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign James Carville said on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Beat With Ari Melber,” that he is “scared to death” the Democratic Party is leaning too far left, as evidenced by 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) having a strong showing in the Iowa caucuses.
Carville said, “There are other things that worry me. Apparently, the turnout in Iowa is not what I would have expected—other people would have expected. The numbers are still coming in. But people are telling me it’s more like 2016. The polling averages have not been very good the last ten days. And I’ve seen some pretty good polls that show enthusiasm among Democrats is not as high as we would like it. So there’s something as people are watching this process that is concerning. I do want to take a chance to congratulate Mayor Pete and his staff. That was a remarkable night they had in Des Moines. I think this is not going particularly well so far. Why is Tom Perez still the chairman of the Democratic National Committee I have no idea. This party needs to wake up and make sure that we talk about things are relevant to people. We need to go back to 2018 where we had good, diverse, strong candidates that had real connections and talked about real things. We don’t need to become the British Labor Party. That’s a bad thing. It’s not going well over there. So Democrats, I want to say, don’t these candidates, and Mayor Pete has something going. Hopefully, Senator Warren can become that student at the University of Houston, the one that knows the plights people go through. Who knows, maybe Mayor Mike can come on. But right now, I have to tell you. I’m not very impressed.”
“Without power, there’s only one moral imperative in this country right now and that is to beat Donald Trump,” he continued. “That’s the only moral imperative. It is the only thing I want to hear. Until we understand that, we win every argument on anything. We don’t win the elections because we talk about stuff that is not relevant. We had a great experience in 2018 and the day after we started that goofy stuff. Hopefully, we’ve got time to jerk this thing back and be about health care and drug prices and education and infrastructure and climate and diplomacy. This is not happening so far. We can’t act like this is going well. We can’t come out and put three wonderful talking points. These campaigns have to be more relevant. For God’s sake, Senator Warren, get real out here. You know, let’s move this thing along. We’ve got to do that.”
“We have all kinds of things very concerning there. And I’m just looking at the mega polling averages. I’m looking at public opinion right now. And frankly, we’ve got to snap back and get this thing going. I don’t want to think about what would happen if we had four more years of Trump,” he added.
Carville then shared his worry and others in the Democrat Party’s concern about the current state of the party.
He said, “Why am I here doing this? Because I am scared to death. Let’s get relevant here for sure. … We have to decide what we want. Do we want to be an ideological cult? Or to have the instinct to have the majority party?”
Carville then cautioned, “We’d better get serious here. A lot of Democrats around the country are concerned. I know these donors, they won’t give a popsicle to the DNC right now. I can tell you that.”
“I have to sound the alarm here,” he concluded. “I’m sorry.”
Follow Pam Key On Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Key findings in the report:
- Shortages should not occur in a free market
- Tight labor markets benefit marginalized
groups
- Wages have been stagnant over the long
term
- Labor force participation is down over the
long term
- Domestic industries should hire Americans
- Natives participate in all major
occupations
- Plenty of STEM workers are available
- Gains to the economy are not the same as
gains to natives
- Immigration is not an efficient solution
to population aging
Pete
Buttigieg Promises Endless Foreign Labor to U.S. Employers
4 Feb 202024
12:06
The
federal government must pass an immigration law that delivers a steady flow of
foreign blue-collar and white-collar visa workers to U.S. employers, former
Mayor Pete Buttigieg told an audience of Democrat voters.
He told Democrats in Clinton, Iowa, February 1:
So another thing we got to do when we do that [immigration]
reform is set it up so that in the future you can review every couple of years
how many work-based visas we need to keep our economy going, instead of it
literally taking an act of Congress to change these quotas and country caps
that are set in stone. So it would create that too, a kind of safety
valve, where there’s an administrative review every couple of years [that]
doesn’t require you to change the entire law.
The foreign
workers, he said, “are indispensable in our economy, especially in our rural
economy.”
But
Buttigieg’s promise of endless foreign labor would force all Americans to
continually fight to keep their jobs against a vast number of foreigners who
are eager to live and work in the United States, even at very low wages, says
Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “Anyone who can
find a job would be allowed to come, which is basically the same thing that
George W. Bush offered with his ‘Any
Willing Worker’ [plan].”
If Buttigieg’s plan becomes law, Americans “might get some wage
growth, but it would be a lot slower, and you’d likely see a continued decline
and stagnation in wages,” he said.
Americans’
prosperity has long been based “on cheap land and expensive labor,”
Krikorian said. But the Democrat candidates and the investor class
“want to go back to the Old World model — expensive land and cheap labor. That
is not conducive to vibrant, middle-class democracy.”
.@PeteButtigieg in Clinton, Iowa: “The reason we have 11
million undocumented immigrants is because our economy needed 11 million more
people than our system was prepared to admit”
In contrast, President Donald Trump has mostly blocked business
demands for more migrants amid competing pressure from his 2016 voters and his
business donors. “We’re seeing wages go up the low end for the first time
in a long time, but that would have happened at a long time ago if we had had
less immigration,” Krikorian said.
Other Democrat candidates share Buttigieg’s support for endless
legal migration — and many town leaders have already implemented it throughout
Iowa.
The town leaders have allowed and even encouraged the arrival of
many migrants to work in the meatpacking plants that dominate the economy of
many towns.
The plants were once manned by middle-class Americans but are
now run with a workforce that mostly consists of illegal migrants from Mexico,
migrants from Central America with pending asylum cases, and new legal refugees
from Africa and the Middle East.
STORM LAKE, Iowa — When Dan
Smith first went to work at the pork processing plant in Storm Lake in 1980,
pretty much the only way to nab that kind of union job was to have a father, an
uncle or a brother already there. The pay, he recalled, was $16 an hour, with
benefits — enough to own a home, a couple of cars, a camper and a boat, while
your wife stayed home with the children.
“It was the best-paying job
you could get, 100 percent, if you were unskilled,” said Mr. Smith, now 66, who
followed his father through the plant gates.
…
The union is long gone, and
so are most of the white faces of men who once labored in the broiling heat of
the killing floor and the icy chill of the production lines. What hasn’t
changed much is Mr. Smith’s hourly wage, which is still about $16 an hour, the
same as when he started 37 years ago. Had his wages kept up with inflation, he
would be earning about $47 an hour.
…
The Rev. Timothy Friedrichsen
[is] the Roman Catholic pastor at St. Mary’s Church in Storm Lake
… “Though some people still feel, ‘This is not the Storm Lake I grew up
in,’” he said, for most of the population, “there is a kind of comfortableness.
This is who we are now.”
There are up
to six
meatpacking plants in Denison, and the city officials are eager to praise the city’s chaotic
diversity brought by the 30 percent of residents who are immigrants:
Nestled in the hills surrounding the Boyer River, Denison is
home to a diverse population of more than 8,000* residents. Denison’s school
district reports that more than 20 languages are spoken in the homes of their
more than 2,000 students. That spirit of diversity shines throughout Denison in
business, community, education, and recreation. We invite you to visit and see
why our diversity makes life in Denison uniquely wonderful.
A 2017 report
by Harvest Public Media sketched the town’s reliance on
cheap, migrant — and often illegal — labor:
Today, the Latino community is well-entrenched, with many small
business owners, a Spanish-language newspaper, and Latino officers on the
police force. … many people still make their way here from Latin America.
They’re fleeing poverty, gang violence or persecution, as generations of
immigrants have done throughout history and around the world.
These arrivals from Mexico and Central America land here
alongside [legal] refugees from Africa and Asia. In particular in Denison, they
often come from South Sudan and Burma (now known as Myanmar). The long, hard
hours of meatpacking work attract newcomers because it doesn’t require much
English and brings in a steady paycheck.
The inflow of
migrants has imposed a high cost on the employees in the town — for example,
by minimizing wage raises in the
meatpacking plants and by exacerbating civic inequality. Roughly 60
percent of
the kids in the local high school are eligible for free lunches, partly because
50 percent of families in the town earn less than $50,000, versus $63,000 nationally.
The inflow
also changed the K–12 school
system needed
by the Americans’
kids.
More than half of the town’s K–12 kids are learning English as a second
language, according to Iowa Public Radio.
Almost
50% of U.S. employees got higher wages in 2019, up from almost 40% in 2018.
That's useful progress - but wage growth will likely rise faster if Congress stopped inflating the labor supply for the benefit of business. http://bit.ly/2SyaLg7
That's useful progress - but wage growth will likely rise faster if Congress stopped inflating the labor supply for the benefit of business. http://bit.ly/2SyaLg7
Pay Raises and Training
Expand in Donald Trump's Tight Labor Market
But the extra
migrants serve as customers for many
Americans and for local merchants in Denison, NetNebraska reported:
Gehlsen co-owns Reynold’s Clothing on Main Street with his
brother Troy Gehlsen. Both agree that immigrants have helped keep their
family’s third-generation men’s clothing store alive.
“They have money to spend like everybody else. They’re no
different than you and me. They need groceries, they need clothes, they need
gas for their vehicles, they need to buy cars. I don’t want this to sound
insensitive, but I mean, I’ve got to survive and provide for my family, too.
And if they’re willing to come in and support my business, that’s great.”
Some Americans describe the costs imposed on Americans in
Denison. Bryan Bryant, for example:
has been in Denison for about a decade caring for his elderly
parents and keeping his mom’s coffee shop, the Robin’s Nest, open. He says he
appreciates immigrants coming to this country legally, but he worries about the
loss of American culture and small town Iowa values.
“It’s good if they embrace the way of life. Sometimes it’s
really sad to see immigrants come here because they want a better life, but
they want us to change into the country they came from. A lot of the newer
ones, they come in and they expect things without participating.”
The same flow
of migrants to meatpackers recurs in Marshalltown, Iowa, where the mayor
welcomes the migrants. ABC News reported in August 2019:
“In restaurants and manufacturing plants,” said Mayor [Joel]
Greer, “it’s tough to find people that can pass a blood test and show up on day
two. And so on immigration, bring it on and fix it, please Congress, because we
need more workers.”
…
“With the ramping up of the ICE idea [of deportations],” he
said, “I know it’s having an effect. I’ll bet we’re having more trouble keeping
workers now because of that fear hanging over people’s heads.”
ABC News described the economics of the meatpacking towns:
Marshalltown’s transformation wasn’t without tension.
In a paper published by the State
Historical Society of Iowa about Storm Lake, a similar Iowa town whose economy
also relies heavily on meat-packing, Dr. Mark Grey of Northern Iowa University
wrote that in the ‘70s and ‘80s, “so-called new breed [corporate] meatpackers —
drove down wages and benefits, increased productivity, neutralized unions,
experienced high employee turn-over, and relied increasingly on immigrant and
refugee labor.”
Meat-packing plants that used to employ experienced butchers
hired unskilled workers, and often preferred workers without a union background,
according to Dr. Grey’s paper, which outlines that towns like Marshalltown
subsequently lost many of their middle-class jobs.
The
Congressional Budget Office states the obvious: The large inflow of poor
migrants cut wages for blue-collar Americans.
But it also suggests US college-grads will suffer similar $$ damage if DC imports more "high skill" college-grad migrants. #S386http://bit.ly/2t4FTJC
But it also suggests US college-grads will suffer similar $$ damage if DC imports more "high skill" college-grad migrants. #S386http://bit.ly/2t4FTJC
CBO: Immigration Has
'Negative Effect on Wages'
But most media outlets refuse to follow the money.
Nebraska’s
National Public Radio (NPR) followed a Latino political activist, Alma Puga, as
she praised the growing population
of non-white “diversity” emigrants in the town:
The young activist was born in Mexico, and came to Denison when
she was five because her parents heard from friends there were jobs in town.
Now she wants to grow roots here, and is focused on getting the local immigrant
communities politically engaged.
“When I came here, it was like, wow. There was so much
diversity, and it was like, I feel like I belong, like I can relate to other
people, with my culture, music and food. I didn’t feel like an outcast like I
did in Storm Lake, Iowa.”
Immigrants have played a large role in keeping Denison, Iowa,
economically and culturally vibrant. Some migrants in that city have noticed
anti-immigrant sentiment increasing in recent years.
…
[David] GREENE: Yeah. I mean, Denison has been far more diverse
for years. It’s actually split 50-50 between whites and minorities. There are
Latinos. There’s a Sudanese population. Alma, our guide, her family came from
Mexico when she was a child.
[Alma] PUGA: My dad had a friend that lived here. So he told him
to come over here; there was plenty of jobs. And so we came.
MARTIN: Jobs like what?
GREENE: A lot in the meatpacking plants in Denison. Immigrants
have – they’ve been working there. They started coming a few decades ago. But
race and immigration have been such big topics in our politics today that I
wondered if anything has changed, you know, in this diverse town that is
surrounded by very white, very conservative areas. So I want to take you inside
this Denison institution. It’s called Conk’s. It’s a family restaurant that is
owned by Eric Skoog.
…
GREENE: So Bryan Pena tonight is going to be caucusing for
Bernie Sanders, and that makes our tour guide, Alma Puga, really
happy. She works with LULAC – that’s the League of United Latin American
Citizens – and she tries to mobilize Latino voters. The message is, if you want
to control the destiny of a community like Denison, you’ve got to vote. Now,
LULAC doesn’t endorse candidates, but Alma personally has been volunteering for
Joe Biden. She likes his record on immigration.
NPR did not say if Puga is an illegal, a DACA beneficiary, or a
naturalized citizen.
Few progressives really want to know what would happen if the
nation’s borders were opened to a huge inflow of migrants, said Krikorian.
Buttigieg and his allies “genuinely believe what they are doing is doing good,”
he said, adding, “Buttigieg is entirely capable of genuinely believing that
mass migration will not have any effect on American workers.”
“I think people have an enormous capacity for self-delusion, and
I think that is what is going on here,” he said.
U.S.
investors denounce Pres. Trump's 'Public Charge' immigration reform -- which
will deny them extra consumers & workers, & will shrink taxpayers'
spending on medical & welfare programs used by poor & sick migrants.
Money explains much about migration.http://bit.ly/2RF87mo .
Money explains much about migration.http://bit.ly/2RF87mo .
Big Biz Warns: Trump
Immigration Reforms Will Hurt Food Stamp, Medicaid Enrollment
GOP/Democrats
Slip Amnesty for 1K Liberian Nationals into Defense Budget
Chris
Hondros/Getty Images
JOHN
BINDER
18 Dec 201959
2:15
Senate Republicans and Democrats
approved a defense budget for Fiscal Year 2020 after slipping into it an
amnesty for nearly 1,000 Liberian nationals who will now be eligible for American
citizenship.
This week, the Senate passed the 2020 National Defense
Authorization Act that includes a provision that gives amnesty to about 840
Liberian nationals and their children who would otherwise have self-deported
from the United States in March.
In early 2018, President Trump ended Deferred Enforced
Departure (DED) for Liberia, which acted as a de facto amnesty for Liberians to
stay in the U.S. since 1991. Liberians were first given the temporary amnesty
in the early 1990s due to a civil war in their nation.
After decades of renewing the temporary amnesty by Presidents
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — despite the nation’s civil war
long having ended — Trump reviewed their DED status and determined that Liberia
is safe for nationals in the U.S. to return to.
The amnesty for Liberian
nationals slipped into the defense budget had been pushed for months by Sen.
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and a handful of Minnesota lawmakers. Effectively, all
Liberian nationals who were allowed to stay in the U.S. over the last few
decades will now be allowed to adjust their immigration status, making them
permanent residences who can eventually apply to become American citizens.
Liberian nationals will only be disqualified from the amnesty if
they have been convicted of aggravated felonies such as murder, rape, child sex
abuse, sex trafficking, and kidnapping.
Also included in the defense budget is billions of American
taxpayer money that will continue funding border security
measures in foreign countries like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia.
Meanwhile, less than $1.4 billion is explicitly
authorized for the construction of a border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.
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